Sauna House is Going Even Greener with Solar Panels

If you’ve been hanging out with us for any amount of time, you know that our mission is to be a bathhouse that's good for people and for the planet. Sustainable operations start with acknowledging the problem: bathhouses inherently use a lot of water (the cold plunge doesn’t fill itself!) and a lot of electricity to keep the saunas hot hot hot. We built Sauna House with low-flow showers and faucets to help offset our footprint, and now we can proudly say that we’re making our facility even greener through the power of renewable energy.

Sauna House officially has solar panels up and running! Sustainable practices have been at the heart of our vision for the bathhouse since day 1, and we’re feeling all proud and sentimental to be checking this initiative off our sustainability bucket list.

Now to get nerdy! Our brand new solar panel system is 8.76kwDC, which means it should produce around 11,000kwh/year (that’s the electricity consumption of an average US home in 1 year!) with higher production in Summer months and lower in Winter months. In our original design, the system was double the size to maximize the available space on the roof, but the fabulous engineers that helped us finalize the plans determined we had to reduce our vision to maintain the roof's integrity – which is paramount!

The solar panel modules installed are N-type monocrystalline by REC Group. Their production is incredibly energy efficient, with an energy payback of less than one year. This means the energy used to produce the modules will be offset in their first year of operation, and energy produced during their lifetime of 30+ years will directly offset the energy produced from other, less clean sources.

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to our community who’s kept us going through hot and cold and allowed us to continue striving to be better than we were yesterday, and to our landlord for helping make our solar-powered dreams come true!